WSJ/Dow Jones names new Chicago bureau chief

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

The following announcement was sent to The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires staff on Friday afternoon by managing editor Robert Thomson:

An important moment of change is upon us in the Chicago bureau, where one of the lions of modern journalism, Bryan Gruley, will be succeeded by one of our most promising young journalists. Jason Dean, China News Editor, will become chief in a combined Journal-Newswires Chicago bureau, to which he will bring valuable lessons from the successfully integrated Beijing operation.

Jason will shepherd coverage of a swath of the country, stretching from Montana to Ohio, and encompassing topics including politics, food, education, floods and airlines. His past has prepared him well for his future responsibilities. He arrived in Beijing in early 1997, and joined Dow Jones two years later, before moving to the Journal as Taiwan correspondent in 2001, covering its brawling democracy and sprawling tech industry.

He returned to Beijing in 2005, and a year later, became deputy bureau chief for China, under Rebecca Blumenstein. Over the next few years, the bureau covered the country’s remarkable economic rise, the devastating Sichuan earthquake, and the Beijing Olympics, and won a Pulitzer for International Reporting for its “Naked Capitalism” series.

In 2010, Jason became the Journal’s China News Editor, under Andy Browne to stitch together, almost seamlessly, the Journal and Newswires operations in an experiment that has since been successfully replicated around the world. He will settle in Chicago early this fall and report to Matt Murray and Steve Wisnefski.

Jason will succeed longtime chief, Bryan Gruley, who has decided to leave the Journal after a distinguished 16-year career. Working in Washington and then Chicago, Bryan established himself as a scoop-driven newshound and talented narrative writer able to infuse stories with enthusiasm and intelligence. He has generously shared those rare skills with the many fortunate young reporters he has mentored through the years.

Bryan covered antitrust in Washington alongside the late, great John Wilke, tracking the monumental Microsoft trial and the travails of the FCC and its head, Reed Hundt. With datelines as diverse as Albuquerque, New Mexico, Washburn, North Dakota, and Jackson, Mississippi, he wrote on a range of contemporary subjects, such as alcohol abuse on college campuses, day traders, prison overbuilding, the perils of the dot-com bust, problems in the voting system, the ethanol boom on the Great Plains, the politics of the Consumer Product Protection Agency, Notre Dame football and, crucially, the National Hockey League. In 2003, he told the profound story of an army lieutenant who protected two survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and then, decades later, reconnected with one of the men, known as Peewee, who had emigrated to the United States and built a life here.

Bryan wrote the first, compelling version of history on Sept. 11, 2001, when the Washington bureau rallied after the attacks on the World Trade Center forced the evacuation of the entire New York reporting staff, putting the paper’s ability to publish in serious doubt. In the midst of the horror of that day, Bryan stayed at his desk to pull together the main news story, collating hundreds of dispatches from dozens of reporters to tell, clearly and cogently, the story of the attacks. His story, bylined only as a Wall Street Journal news roundup, was the lead submission in the package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.

The following April, our colleague Dan Henninger wrote about that day:

“On September 11, Bryan Gruley, an editor in this paper’s Washington bureau, received dispatches from 50 reporters…The Page One story that resulted, ‘Nation Stands in Disbelief in Horror,’ which was the lead story in the Journal’s Pulitzer submission, is a seamless account of September 11, as if done by a single person. What that story did, what good newspapering does, is take the chaos that is the Information Highway and submit it to an organizing intelligence — first the reporters and, after them, a series of editors and copy editors who have the skills, in a few hours, to make that chaos coherent.”

Bryan then shepherded a multi-reporter project, “Five Lives”, a moving, suspenseful account of five 9/11 victims and their families from the seconds before the attacks through the harrowing days that followed.
Some of Bryan’s notable contributions to the written word did not appear in the pages of the Journal. In recent years, he has become a mystery writer on the side, with a first novel that was nominated for an Edgar award. After Danny Pearl was murdered in 2002, Bryan composed a tribute in song for his then-unborn son in the hope that it would one day help him to understand his father. And in a guide for new reporters compiled by the bureau, Bryan sagely wrote:

“Enjoy the journey. We are lucky and privileged to go places many people can’t go, meet people others can’t meet, see things others can’t see. We have great jobs. (As a hockey player who got to drink beer from the Stanley Cup while doing an Ahed, I can attest.) Let these opportunities enrich your personal life as well as your professional life. Sometimes the ultimate result won’t be exactly as you’d like it–but don’t let that ruin the entire experience.”

We wish Bryan every success and the best of luck on the next stage of his journey.